In the spirit of leveling the dichotomy between the aesthetics of architectural representation and its instrumentality, UCLA Architecture and Urban Design invited alumni and current faculty to submit drawings for an exhibition to honor the department's 50th anniversary. This exhibition in the Perloff Gallery celebrates the diversity of our alumni's wide-ranging accomplishments, and serves as the inaugural event to form an A.UD alumni association.

The submitted drawings are a collection of analog and digital drawings, representative of various developmental phases of projects, from conceptual sketches to construction details, consisting of line work and similar stages or speeds of production. The drawings on display range from fast sketches that were needed to solve a construction detail on site, to laboriously drafted compositions endowed with the intention to generate specific design solutions.

True to the spirit of the architectural design process and the simultaneous presence of various production speeds and stages along a given timeline, this exhibition is not curated based on a priori categories or aesthetic agendas, but represents a collection, self-organized a posteriori through emerging patterns and sub-patterns.

"Working drawings embody a more complicated aesthetics of utility, where formal decisions are motivated by consequences in the world. Although it is theoretically feasible, I am not sure that it is actually possible to make a good building with bad drawings. It is precisely by not searching for formal or aesthetic effect but rather by solving specific problems that working drawings paradoxically succeed as aesthetic or formal artifacts."